When we examine the historiography of the study of Japonisme in painting, source material other than ukiyo-e has rarely been examined in detail. In this paper I am concentrating on Rinpa art and how and why this type of art was taken up by many Western artists and critics from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. This paper focuses on two issues, which were either only lightly touched upon or not dealt with at all in previous studies. First and my main point is to clarify the relationship of the popularity of Rimpa and the formation of Western Modernism by using Clive Bell’s concept ‘significant form’ and also by examining how the concept of decorative painting/sôshokuga was seen as being modernist. My second point is a hitherto neglected key issue namely that for both the West and Japan the spectre of China was an important component within the Rinpa appreciation at the time.